Benoît Fleury

I hear from informed sources that these #NoKings rallies are more than twice as big as last time, making them easily the largest protests in US history. Thanks to everyone and especially organizers.

"Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands."

— Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

Special education isn't a "nice thing to have." It isn't "charity" or doing something to make us feel better. It is a right. The right to a Free Appropriate Public Education is codified in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, signed by a Republican president.

No Kings As the president escalates his authoritarian power grab, the NO KINGS non-violent movement continues to rise stronger. We are united once again to remind the world: America has No Kings and the power ...

No Kings. October 18th. Free speech is action. Please join in.
www.nokings.org

"3) To describe a circle with any centre and distance."

The third postulate lets you change the orientation of a line segment without changing its magnitude.

"2) To produce a finite straight line continuously in a straight line."

The second postulate lets you change the magnitude of a line segment without changing its orientation.

"1) To draw a straight line from any point to any point."

The first postulate lets you create arbitrary line segments because you have to start somewhere.

We can interpret Euclid's first three postulates as *independent* primitives to construct figures made out of line segments.

The postulates let you change independently the magnitude and the orientation of the line segments.

Teams have a lot of freedom so this is not how all teams work (thankfully).

Isn’t that sad? But yes, I’ve seen those things even at Stripe last year :(

Unfortunately most PRDs I have seen are at a very detailed level of design (basically every time you have a mockup) and you know that’s the author could not have consciously made all the design decisions to go down at this level.

One of the culprits of those “undesigns” is often the Product Requirement Document which basically force you to unconsciously design the whole thing to be able to write at the level of detail expected by the stakeholders.

"We are told that AI is inevitable, that we must adapt or be left behind. But universities are not tech companies. Our role is to foster critical thinking, not to follow industry trends uncritically." www.ru.nl/en/research/...

Abstraction, probably the most important idea in computing.

source: www.openculture.com/2023/10/the-...

Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of software systems, and that the invention and operation of the said systems are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing your Lordship my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.

Crafting a new cover letter...

If you're too high-level, focusing on function too much, you end up with a design that does not scale, adding features upon features.

If you're too low-level, focusing on mechanism too much, you end up with primitives that are not independent and not composable.

The main problem of design is finding the right independent primitives for your domain.

Why independent? Because the user should be able to compose the primitives to solve their specific problem.

You can fail by being too high-level or too low-level.

This month marks my 40th anniversary using #emacs. I cannot think of any other software with that kind of staying power.

+1

REST is an architectural style for worldwide hypermedia applications. What you want for the API of your distributed system is RPC.

Not just art. Talking. Writing. Editing. Designing. Coding. Thinking.

Doing well at anything takes years of practice. Ceding that to a machine defeats the whole purpose of taking pleasure from one's chosen path in life.

a snippet of a mini-comic, at top - straight line stretches from point A to B. Immediately below, same dot at A, then becomes a curving, meandering line that winds through the page and ends at a point with rays and a question mark emanating from it. Text reads: "Nothing can do this for you - that robs you of experience and conflates answers with learning. Rather, it's all the decisions you make along the way, the mistakes, struggles, and surprises! These pathways you create - this is learning.

my statement on Ai from the mini-comic I'm making as syllabus for a new class I'm teaching this fall. It's simple, but I pretty much said all I have to say on it - it robs you of decisions and struggle - and the joy of being surprised. It robs you of learning...

"There is, perhaps, no surer mark of folly than an attempt to correct the natural infirmities of those we love." — Henry Fielding, "Tom Jones"

"Because — as humans — we suffer from many cognitive biases — and a deep one is “confirmation bias” — it’s critical — no matter how much we think something is true — to maintain a little area where doubt can operate."

— www.quora.com/If-Alan-Kay-...

“Languages should be designed not by adding features but by removing weaknesses that make more features seem necessary.”
#Abelson and #Sussman

Do you have a prediction about where this drop will be transferred to?

My 2-sentence summary of the Clojure philosophy:

Software should be defined in terms of abstractions, not concretions. But beware of bespoke abstractions, an oxymoron.

Funny how we force engineers to write ADRs for every trade‑off, yet billion‑dollar strategic bets live in hallway whispers and fluffy slide decks.

What if we treated business decisions like architecture? Context, options, trade‑offs, metrics, all in a repo, version‑controlled and reviewed?

Edgar Morin - Wikipedia

I'm just starting to read Edgar Morin and it is connecting a lot of dots for me about complexity, order, organization, science, knowledge...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_M...

I’ll re-read it. But I’m with you. I always want to call myself a software designer rather than engineer but that would be completely misunderstood :)